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Powell Aide Says Case for War a 'Hoax'
PBS recently aired an interview with Col. Lawrence B. Wilkerson (Ret), Chief of Staff at the Department of State from Aug 2002 - January 2005, addressing some of the skepticism surrounding the pre-war claims made by the Bush administration. Wilkerson claims in no uncertain terms that he "participated in a hoax on the American people, the international community and the United Nations Security Council." This is not the first time that Wilkerson has spoken out against the administration and intelligence community.
Everyone outside the US already knows this.
I wonder whether he'll be marked - crazy, unreliable, or simply unpatriotic
I've been watching Wilkerson's speeches and interviews and opinions since early 2005. He's been one of the highest ranking officials to speak about the cabal that is in control of the White House now, but he also has inferred that the cabal has been in power for longer than the currency administration has been. For those who are anti-Bush, do not believe the Clinton was not part of the power party, either.
I strongly believe that the true case for war was to keep the petrodollar in power. I also believe that almost every war and military action we've been involved in since 1913 has been primarily for control of the global currency base, not for oil or trade or communism or any of the usual suspects.
Iran's current oil bourse theories came along just before the power party started beating the war drums against Iraq. I posted today the link to the Cheuvreux Report that reconfirms my crazy tinfoil hat theories about the control of the dollar, and this time from a huge international investment bank. War is the health of the State, said Randolph Bourne. For millenia, war was always about directly controlling others. Yet in the recent centuries, war has been about controlling others indirectly -- by controlling the means of barter between people.
No matter what Bush or Rice or Clinton or Nixon or Kennedy have said, hindsight lets us see what they were really about -- making sure that their peers and families and cronies were at the front of the welfare lines when our Federal Reserve was handing out newly printed paper dollars. To believe anything else is to continue to be a pawn to the system.
Where's my "-1 Corrosively Jaded" when I need it? ;-)
...there'll be an interview with another crew-cut dude with a dot-mil e-mail address, not retired, who'll say the first dude had an axe to grind and is totally wrong. And he'll be right. And the first guy will have been right, too, well, mostly...
Yeah, but Fox is slanted.
Wait, I thought it was PBS that was slanted.
Hillary's moving to the right!!
But Condi's a snappier dresser.
Act before midnight tonight, and we'll throw in a debate on global warming!
Step Right Up! Choose yer channel, make yer choice!
(Get away from me, Mod, ya bother me...)
I really feel bad for him.
He should have either run for President or gotten out after Clinton and not come back.
Bush & Cheney took all the credibility he had built up and wasted it by sending him to the U.N. to tell fairytales.
You can read the speech here but it isn't really worth doing, as so many of the facts provided in that speech have been proven false and were apparently known to be false at the time the speech was given.
[Fuck Beta]
o0t!
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Smedley Darlington Butler (July 30, 1881 - June 21, 1940), nicknamed "the fighting Quaker" and "Old Gimlet Eye," was a Major General in the U.S. Marine Corps and, at the time of his death, the most decorated Marine in U.S. history. Butler was awarded the Medal of Honor twice during his career, one of only 19 people to be so decorated. He was noted for his outspoken left-wing views and his book War is a Racket, one of the first works describing the military-industrial complex. After retiring from service, Butler became a popular speaker at meetings organized by veterans, communists, pacifists and church groups in the 1930s. Butler came forward to the U.S. Congress in 1934 to report that a proposed coup had been plotted by wealthy industrialists to overthrow the government of President Franklin D. Roosevelt.
"Speaking the Truth in times of universal deceit is a revolutionary act." -- George Orwell
The problem is that politicians could lie and get away with it. Before the war Bush & Co were pretending that we were in danger from Iraq, and now that they've been proven wrong no one called them on the original claims. If I call the police and falsely claim there's a robbery when there isn't, I will be fined for false call. Bush made a false call which caused 2,000+ Americans and unknown number of Iraqis to die - and he just got away with it.
We need some sort of accountability system that would force politicians to pay for their mistakes. Require them to publicly estimate cost of war and take all outstanding costs from their personal bank accounts. Wolfowitz estimated war to cost around half a billion, and so far we ended up with more than $200 billion (yes, two hundreen billion US dollars) of extra costs. If Bush & Co were forced to pay all outstanding costs, they would've estimated the cost of war honestly, and people wouldn't be misled into supporting war.
Same thing for human cost. Require pro-war politicians to gather signatures. It's way too easy to say "I support a war" while sitting at home in front of TV. Make a law that starting a war would require million or so legally binding signatures from people to cover in case we run out of troops. There's always so many vocal pro-war supporters, but when it comes to actually fighting the war we always seem to run out of people. Make war supporters actually carry the cost of war, and they will actually start using their brains first.
Obama 2012: our incompetent asshole is slightly less of an incompetent asshole than the other incompetent asshole !
First let me say, I'm a Bush supporter. I'm in the Reserves, and I participated in Operation Iraqi Freedom (OIF). I was lucky enough to be 1500 miles from the front lines, unlike the rest of my unit, but in any event I was there and I've got the tee-shirt to prove it. When the war first started, I was completely in favor of it. Today, I don't regret that we went in at all, and think in the long run the Iraqi people (and by extension the rest of the Middle East) will be much better off with a participatory democracy than living under the heel of a thug.
Having said all that, it's becoming more and more worrisome to me the degree to which the administration apparently ignored or possibly fabricated evidence. I remember saying at the time that it was a fool's errand to use WMD and/or terrorism as the reason to go to war, and that it seemed more like slick marketing than actual strategery. We had plenty of reasons to go in, and none of them had anything to do with WMDs or terrorism. Like the fact that the Iraqi forces habitually fired on US and UK aircraft patrolling the UN mandated No Fly Zones (considering that just prior to the war, I was working in the Turkish command center that controlled the Northern No Fly Zone and had friends and, literally, family flying over Iraq, yeah, I kinda took it personally).
But apparently someone, somewhere, decided that overt acts of aggression in violation of a cease-fire agreement weren't sufficient reason to justify reopening hostilities. So they decided to use weak or non-existant evidence to justify it, instead. Stupid. Just fucking stupid.
So now here we are, not-quite-three years later. We've spent billions of dollars, have hundreds of thousands of troops on the ground, and have thousands of war dead. What's the solution? Well, on the right you have people saying "It wasn't a lie, it was just a mistake." Well, when it comes to something of this magnitude, does it really matter if the root was incompetence or malfeasance? Sure, maybe from a criminal point of view (for instance, I'm not convinced there's a case for impeachment here). But not a whom-do-you-trust-to-run-the-country point of view.
Then on the left we have people like Murtha and Kennedy screaming that we should leave, RIGHT NOW GODDAMNIT!!! That's just insane, we can't leave the Iraqis in a worse position than we found them. That would be like walking away from a car stuck underwater with a woman trapped inside. I mean, what kind of man does that?
So here's what I want to see from politicians: be willing to say "Looks like we screwed up. We completely apologize to the Iraqi people and ask that you forigive us. We promise, to our citizens and the world, that we'll never again invade another country without an individual declaration of war passed by the Congress, ensuring that there will be a full debate before we, as a nation, take the lives of other human beings. We also promise that, now that we're in Iraq, we need to do right by the Iraqis and help them fix all the problems we caused. To that end, we'll follow the policies implemented by the Iraqi National Congress, and be willing to lend whatever assistance they request of us.[1]" Any politician who can say that, consistently, with a straight face, would get my vote.
[1] I know this would be effectively giving the Iraqi government a blank check, but I think that would be worth it to gain some much needed good will.
God invented whiskey so the Irish would not rule the world.
Here are some current "facts" from the Bush administration that are being accepted without question by the media and most of the US population:
If we withdraw from Iraq the terrorists will win.
This statement seems to imply that unless the USA maintains 100,000+ troops in Iraq for many years then the insurgents will overrun Iraq and set up Bin Laden as a dictator of Iraq. This is obviously false at a number of levels. At a most basic level, the insurgents lack the capability to defeat the Shiite militias. In the broader picture, even if the USA sets up a stable democracy after many year of occupation, there is no guarantee that the Iraqi people will not elect a government with strong ties to organizations that the USA considers to be terrorist organizations. Whether it is a good idea for the USA to maintain substantial trooop levels in Iraq for many years to come is unclear without substantial impartial detailed study. If these studies have been done at all, the results have certainly not been presented to the American people. Instead, we are merely given some simplistic message about how the terrorists will win unless we do what the Bush administration wants.
Social security is broken.
The way social security works is that people who are working pay into the system and that money is used to pay benefits for people who are retired. Strictly speaking, it's not possible for the system to break. The government just transfers the money that is collected from the workers to those receiving retirement benefits. In order to cushion the effect of the baby boom generation, however, the government was collecting more than it was paying out. The problem is that the rest of the government started borrowing against this surplus and now the Bush administration is looking to avoid having to pay it back. Whether the current system is optimal is certainly open to debate but the idea that the system is "broken" is obviously false.
The Bush administrion did nothing illegal in order the NSA to listen in on American phone conversations
From the Bill of Rights in the US constitution:
I'm not a constitutional scholar but that seems to rather clearly state that some kind of warrant is required. Maybe there's a loop hole and maybe there isn't but it is certainly not factual to blatantly assert that it is legal for the US government to listen in on American phone conversations without a warrant.The reason Clinton got impeached for parsing words, is because the Republicans controlled Congress & they managed to get Articles of Impeachment passed. The Impeachment died in the Senate... because the Republicans couldn't convince 75% of the Senators that it was a good idea.
[Fuck Beta]
o0t!
In another news story today, Bush announced he will cut the deficit by cutting domestic programs. Is it safe to assume that, after this story aired, PBS will be one of the programs cut?
I don't think most rational humans want to see Iraq become a terrorist state. This is why we need to stay the course at this point and why playing politics with the Iraqi war is going to do more damage than good to a potential presidential canidate.
Would you personally be willing to die to "stay the course"? Would you ask your children to die for this cause? You're assuming that we can win the war in Iraq. If we can't win, then letting more of our bravest and most patriotic citizens die needlessly is equivalent to murdering them.
If anyone in this administration, including the president, lied or ignored evidence in order to push this war on the people, then they should be executed for treason.
I remember that Clinton signed the treaty for membership in the International Criminal Court, though he didn't submit it for ratification to the Republican Congress. And I remember that Bush nullified Clinton's signature when he took over a couple of years later.
I don't know what you remember, but the facts show there was a big difference.
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make install -not war
back in 1998 hussein had WMDs and a WMD program. that's why all of those quotes are from 1998. in late 1998, clinton got pissed and bombed the shit out of iraq, targeting anything that looked remotely like a WMD storage or manfacture facility.
that isn't to say that some dems didn't speak of WMD programs in iraq after then, but just realize that using those statements from 1998 is about as disingenuous as using quotes from 1945 to 'prove' that the democrats thought germany was a threat to the US in 1973.
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Is this the MPAA? Is this the RIAA? Is this the DMCA? I thought it was the USA!
IRA terrorism finally disappeared after 9/11. Up until then sympathetic Americans were happy to fund an organisation that bought weapons from Libya to kill people in England.